Early Nutrition and Its Effect on Growth, Body Composition, and Later Obesity

Early nutrition is an important factor regulating both early and long-term growth and body composition, and therefore has important effects on the risk of later overweight and obesity. There is a lot of activity within this research area with a wealth of publications including observational studies, intervention studies, and studies focusing on the potential mechanisms behind associations between early nutrition and different aspects of growth. There has been a special interest in factors with potential mediating effects between early nutrition and later growth such as growth factors and growth-related hormones, appetite-related hormones, and factors with a potential programming effect, e.g., epigenetic programming. For this short review we have included 11 papers which we found of special interest published during the period from July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016. We have chosen to focus mainly on 2 areas where there has been a lot of activity and many publications: the effects of early protein intake on later overweight and obesity, and aspects of breastfeeding which can have effects on risk of later overweight and obesity. There is strong evidence that high protein intake early in life is associated with an increased risk of later obesity. However, there are only few intervention studies and the causality and the mechanisms are still being discussed. Recently, we summarized publications from the last years on this topic [1]. We have included 5 key papers on this topic that we found of special interest. It is still being discussed whether breastfeeding protects against later overweight and obesity. Recently, in a Lancet series on breastfeeding, it was concluded that there was suggestive evidence of protection [2]. This conclusion was based also on studies from low-and middle-income settings. They mention that residual confounding by socioeconomic position is a possibility, but also that breastfeeding reduced the risk by 13% in the high-quality studies. We have included 4 studies on the aspects of breastfeeding and later obesity which we found of special interest.